The phenomenal growth of advanced mobile devices, or smartphones, has been accompanied by the development of “app stores.” App stores, typically provided by smartphone manufacturers, are online facilities that allow applications to be downloaded to a mobile phone or device. These applications can then provide services to the mobile device user. For example, such applications can include electronic books and magazines, financial tools that allow users to access bank accounts and investments, etc.
With mobile devices and smartphones becoming an increasingly large part of a service provider's network, app stores now contain an increasing number of applications. For example, the Apple app store is said to include more than a hundred seventy thousand applications for download, while the Android store has more than fifty thousand. With so many apps available, finding a useful app for a particular purpose or suitable for a particular occasion is fraught with difficulties. There are too many apps to try every one of them or even randomly choose some to try. Consequently, most users rely on word of mouth or other indicia of popularity to decide which apps to download and use.
Many Internet and other sites now try to guess the goal or motivation of an online user. For example, a search engine may examine the search requests of an online user and guess that the user is interested in finding a restaurant. The search engine may then “complete the request” by suggesting a restaurant, show an advertisement, offer a deal or coupon, or offer to make a reservation for the user. However, the problem is made more complex for mobile users. More particularly, the nature of a mobile device is such that mobile users often do not engage in search requests, even when the mobile device is turned on.
There is, therefore, a need for an entity to match the needs of a use of a mobile device with the available apps in order for successfully carrying out or limiting and controlling particularized tasks. There is also a need to infer the goal and motivation of a mobile user, particularly if the mobile user does not issue many search requests.